M81 & M82 - Bode's and Cigar Galaxies (Mark F)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: Bode's Galaxy · Cigar Galaxy · HD85458 · M 81 · M 82 · NGC 3031 · NGC 3034

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M81 & M82 - Bode's and Cigar Galaxies

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M81 & M82 - Bode's and Cigar Galaxies

Only having been able to glimpse at their smudges in my DOB years ago, this famous pair has been on my list of galaxies to image.

M81's classic spiral shape is oriented in a way to show off its dust lanes. Holmberg IX, M81's dwarf irregular companion galaxy just barely showing up as a smudge below the main disk. I'd like to get more time on these to see if I can get it to pop more.

The edge on M82 with the distinctive hydrogen jets bursting out of its center gets the nickname Cigar galaxy. The stars and gas in this galaxy are very compact, causing some intense star formation activity and the outburst of ionized hydrogen. This is possibly due to a close encounter with it had with M81 a few million years back. This would be a great target to try imaging with the HA filter to expose additional detail in the jets.

This is my second target with the ASI1600MM pro. At the time of posting the initial revision, I've been going through Adam Block's excellent PixInsight lessons. Will be uploading updates as I go through more lessons and learn to better process images.

Processing steps:

Blink to remove exposure issues (clouds, trails, guiding)

Weighted Batch Pre-Processing Script

Mure Denoise

DBE

Deconvolution

RGB Channel Combination

Photometic Color Calibration

Masked Stretch

LRGB Combination

Curves Transformation

Color Saturation

ICC Profile Transformation

Resample

Revision B Updates:

RGB SCNR + ArcSinhStretch

Lum HDR Multiscale Transform

LRGB MultiscaleLinearTransform + TGVDenoise

Original
Final
B

B

Description: Reworked processing with: RGB SCNR + ArcSinhStretch, Lum HDR Multiscale Transform, LRGB MultiscaleLinearTransform + TGVDenoise.

Uploaded: ...

NOVAC

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3549514
PixInsight job	7EJMMJ5988H16PGK0C4I8USQ6F8POYHJ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	09h55m22s.299
RA (top/left)	09h54m33s.394
RA (top/right)	09h49m04s.878
RA (bottom/right)	09h56m08s.505
RA (bottom/left)	10h01m49s.580

Dec (center)	+69°18′27″.77
Dec (top/left)	+69°55′23″.39
Dec (top/right)	+69°02′27″.49
Dec (bottom/right)	+68°41′30″.77
Dec (bottom/left)	+69°33′35″.74

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M81 & M82 - Bode's and Cigar Galaxies

M81 & M82 - Bode's and Cigar Galaxies

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M81 & M82 - Bode's and Cigar Galaxies

M81 & M82 - Bode's and Cigar Galaxies

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